In 2018, China's express delivery volume surpassed 5 billion pieces, accounting for nearly half of the global total, marking the arrival of an era where one hundred million packages are handled daily.
The rapid growth of the express delivery industry has also brought inevitable negative impacts. Environmental issues are a significant part of these, with a large amount of packaging waste and air pollution generated during the transportation of parcels quietly affecting people's lives.
Green packaging and green logistics have become essential needs of the times and society. This article will explore from a micro perspective the entire life journey of a package and its greening, looking forward to soon seeing a completely green package throughout its journey.
According to public information sources such as the 2018 Report on the Development of Green Logistics in China, the full life cycle journey of a package from order placement to delivery to the customer mainly includes packaging, transportation, warehousing, distribution, and recycling stages. The green journey of a package primarily achieves greening through these stages.
I. Green Packaging:
With the introduction of a series of standards such as the Implementation Plan for Promoting Green Packaging in the Express Delivery Industry and the Express Packaging Supplies, green packaging has become a trend that major express and logistics companies need to follow. "Greening, reduction, and recyclability" are the three major indicators of green packaging work in the express delivery industry during the '13th Five-Year Plan' period.
A package typically includes tape, cartons/envelopes, and packaging bags, with the latter coming in various forms such as plastic film bags, air cushion bags, and plastic woven bags. Currently, mainstream e-commerce platforms, express delivery companies, and their suppliers are taking measures to achieve green packaging:
1. Original Box Shipping: Shipping directly using the original product box without additional packaging. This reduces packaging material consumption, alleviates environmental pressure, and cuts costs for merchants and logistics companies.
2. Reuse of Cartons: Reusing old cartons as packaging materials to reduce carton consumption.
3. Electronic Waybills: Using smaller electronic waybills or purely electronic waybills to replace traditional multi-part waybills. Cainiao Network’s electronic waybills save over 20 billion paper waybills annually for the industry.
4. Cutting Box Algorithm: Through intelligent algorithms, reduce packaging material usage. It is estimated that through smart box design and cutting algorithms, packaging material usage can be reduced by 15% in warehouses. According to Cainiao Network, this algorithm has been applied to over 510 million packaging boxes and courier bags so far. Sellers just need to input the dimensions and historical order quantities of their products, and the system will automatically recommend the best-sized box. When new orders come in, the system matches the product volume with the appropriate box and provides packing instructions and placement patterns. This is a typical case of technological innovation promoting low-carbon and environmental protection.
5. Biodegradable Plastic Bags: Replacing traditional plastic bags with biodegradable plastic bags is positive from an environmental perspective. From a low-carbon perspective, the Carbonstop team has calculated that if the biodegradable plastic bag is 100% PLA, it can achieve carbon reduction; however, if it contains PBAT, it is uncertain whether carbon reduction is achieved. Below is a list of mainstream green packaging materials:
(Source: 2018 Report on the Development of Green Logistics in China)
6. Tape-Free Cartons: The environmental benefit of tape-free cartons lies in reducing tape usage and the resulting environmental pollution. In terms of low-carbon benefits, while tape-free cartons increase the surface area of the carton, they reduce the damage rate of cartons, thereby increasing their reuse rate and reducing carbon emissions over their entire lifecycle.
(Source: Ant Forest)
II. Green Transportation:
The greening of the transportation process mainly manifests in two aspects:
1. Greening of Transportation Vehicles
Major logistics companies are replacing traditional fuel vehicles with new energy electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions during transportation (of course, the premise for carbon reduction is that the emission coefficient of electricity used by electric vehicles must be lower, ensuring that the emissions per 100 kilometers of electric vehicle usage are lower than those of fuel vehicles, which also requires optimization of the country's energy structure and an increase in the proportion of renewable energy).
2. Intelligent Reduction of Transportation Distance
New energy vehicles not only achieve green energy but also enable intelligence. New energy logistics vehicles, through the establishment of a "smart brain," generate optimal delivery routes based on dynamic orders and adjust pages autonomously according to business and road conditions, interacting with drivers to achieve intelligent transportation and distribution.
By implementing strategies such as store-based shipping and nearby distribution, efficiency can be improved while reducing overall transportation distance and lowering the carbon emissions per unit product during transportation.
III. Green Warehousing:
The greening of warehousing processes mainly involves energy-saving facilities and measures in warehouses and transfer centers, such as using rooftop photovoltaic power generation, LED lighting, straw pallets instead of plastic or metal pallets, utilizing natural light, and properly implementing waste sorting.
IV. Green Distribution:
The greening of the last-mile delivery process mainly includes:
1. Greening of Couriers' Transport Tools: Replacing fuel vehicles with electric vehicles for couriers.
2. Large-Scale Application of Smart Parcel Lockers: Reducing the carbon emissions generated by couriers driving electric vehicles in residential areas (typically larger communities) through smart parcel lockers.
V. Green Recycling:
After receiving a package, how users handle it has always been a source of environmental pollution. Cainiao Network's "Return Box Program" has been effectively implemented in delivery stations. After a package is unpacked at a station, the cardboard box can be recycled and reused by the next person sending a package.
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To achieve green logistics, leading e-commerce giants and their logistics platforms in China have a responsibility to do so, and it is heartening to see their innovations and efforts in the fields of green packaging and logistics.
1. Cainiao Green Action
At the 2016 Global Smart Logistics Summit, Cainiao Network announced the launch of the Cainiao Green Alliance - "Green Action" - in collaboration with 32 Chinese and global partners, committing to replace 50% of packaging materials with 100% biodegradable green packaging by 2020.
This is the largest environmental joint action in the logistics industry to date. During his keynote speech that evening, Jack Ma, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group, specifically mentioned the hope that the logistics industry and Cainiao would work together to study and make China's logistics truly the logistics of the future, turning China's logistics into green logistics.
This green alliance includes well-known Chinese and global logistics companies such as the "Four Expresses and One Post," China Post, Russia Post, Canada Post, FedEx, Singapore Post, Suning, and RRD. Besides the replacement plan for environmentally friendly packaging materials, this initiative also commits to reducing industry-wide carbon emissions by 3.62 million tons over five years through the use of new energy vehicles, recyclable materials, reusable packaging, and the establishment of a packaging recycling system.
2. JD Qingliu Plan
By 2020, JD aims to reduce the use of single-use packaging boxes in the supply chain by 100 billion, equivalent to the total usage of express packaging boxes nationwide in 2015. From brand manufacturers to e-commerce companies, JD Logistics will achieve 80% recyclable packaging materials and a 25% reduction in the weight of packaging materials per unit product. On the consumer side, JD Logistics will ensure that more than 50% of plastic packaging is made from biodegradable materials, 100% of logistics packaging uses recyclable or recyclable materials, and 100% of logistics packaging printing uses environmentally friendly printing processes.
JD Logistics has already built a large-scale fleet of new energy vehicles in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu. It has implemented rooftop distributed photovoltaic power generation systems in the Shanghai Asia No.1 warehouse, developed a new type of two-layer logistics label that saves 700 tons of paper annually, and widely applied biodegradable courier bags, eliminating nearly 10 billion traditional plastic bags each year. Additionally, JD Logistics has deployed 100,000 Qingliu recycling boxes.
JD Logistics launched the "Qingliu Plan." Due to its own logistics system, it can directly scale the application of new energy vehicles, photovoltaic power generation, and eco-friendly packaging in packaging, transportation, and warehousing, which is its advantage in achieving green logistics.
3. Suning Qingcheng Plan
The "Qingcheng Plan" is a new exploration and upgrade of Suning Logistics in urban dimensions, dedicated to creating a globally leading full-chain green logistics solution. Combining local characteristics, it drives innovation, addresses problems at the source, and promotes social collaboration, advancing the full-scenario application of green products to create a new type of green logistics city.
By 2020, Suning Logistics will roll out 20 smart green warehouses equipped with big data, IoT, and AI technologies. Green packaging will be scaled up, with a target of deploying over 2 billion green recyclable packaging products nationwide by 2020. Green transportation will be upgraded, with Suning Logistics initiating an online-offline intelligent logistics system + new energy vehicles. By increasing the proportion of nearby shipments from stores and reshaping logistics efficiency through intelligent algorithms, Suning Logistics plans to deploy 10,000 new energy vehicles over the next three years, gradually replacing fuel vehicles. At the terminal network level, all Suning stores will open "service zones" and "recycling zones," and green recycling stations will be integrated into community services.
4. SF Express and Other Courier Companies
The waste and environmental pollution caused by express envelopes when users send and receive packages are also very significant. How courier companies improve envelopes to make them reusable has become an urgent social need. It is gratifying to see that companies like SF Express are also trying to make changes, allowing envelopes to be used multiple times.
Our team recently came across a startup that made a small but ingenious design change to the everyday express envelope, increasing its reuse potential to up to 15 times. The Carbonstop team also helped this startup calculate the carbon reduction achieved by this eco-friendly envelope compared to conventional ones. We look forward to more startups bringing such low-tech (not necessarily advanced new technologies but simple creative ideas and inventions that achieve the desired effect) innovations to the market and gaining acceptance from courier companies. This is what the public expects and what is most exciting.
In summary, through the joint efforts mentioned above, the green journey of a package should be as follows:
"Products are shipped in tape-free original boxes, dispatched from the nearest warehouse through intelligent scheduling; electronic waybills are used for information processing; warehouses utilize photovoltaic power generation and straw pallets; new energy vehicles are used for transportation during transit, delivering goods to smart parcel lockers or delivery stations; after receiving the package, users can recycle the packaging for reuse, completing the truly green journey of a package."
